How Payments Providers Can Position Themselves to Lead in the Agentic Commerce Era
With the rapidly evolving agentic commerce revolution - where consumers direct “AI agents” to automatically shop and pay on their behalf - payment providers are enhancing their payment capabilities to accommodate agentic transactions. While payment providers are focusing on making sure their payment rails can function with Agentic Commerce, the next most pressing concern is to make sure their cards are the preferred payment method in a world in which an agent will make an automated decision about which payment tender to use.
In addition to saving money, agents will save consumers’ time. Consumers sink valuable time into finding savings: a Citi survey noted that 95% of shoppers would spend time searching for discounts and promo codes, and spend an average of 19 minutes searching for promo codes. Payments providers integrating with agentic commerce agents should automatically surface deals and, where possible, shopping rewards and loyalty perks a transaction might be eligible for. This delivers the dual benefit of time savings and the best price.
In order to be the preferred payment selected by an AI agent, payment providers must align with the agents’ decision-making. Most agents prioritize their logic to be aligned with consumers’ best interests: finding the right product at the best price. With that in mind, payment providers must convey to agents not just the transaction mechanics, but also the advantages of selecting that payment; in particular, value, rewards, loyalty currencies and related consumer benefits. This is essential to retain primacy and stay top-of-wallet in the rapidly evolving landscape.
Issuers seek wallet primacy, and for good reason. A recent study from i2c Inc. reported that customers spend an average of nearly $2,000 per/month on their primary card, roughly 67% more than their second-choice card.
Assembling the building blocks
In order to integrate with AI platforms, payment providers are leveraging technologies which enable systems to talk to systems. For example, APIs and MCPs are two primary interfaces which enable AI tools to seamlessly interact with external data sources. APIs are Application Programming Interfaces, used to access real-time information that may not have been in a model’s training data. MCP is Model Context Protocol, a standard from Anthropic, which enables AI tools to access data from multiple complex systems without needing individual custom integrations. An ideal integration for a payment provider would be to offer API endpoints or an MCP server that would allow agents to apply rewards and loyalty offerings, including coupons, cashback and special offers available through the payment provider.
Key players in this ecosystem are focusing energy on both enabling themselves to be functional in an AI environment, as well as integrate offers and rewards into the experience so that features like card reward eligibility, discounts, offers, and cashback are embedded within the mechanisms for agents to execute transactions. PayPal, Mastercard, and Visa have all made related